By Modeste Schwartz.
Romania – In all the post-communist countries integrated in the EU and showing signs of rebellion, the Euro-Globalist forces (which now also oversee the Atlanticist-Globalist structures left behind by the Obama administration, and which the Trump administration has not yet had the time / the means / the will to dismantle) are now obviously convinced of the impossibility of a return to power through the ballot boxes, and opt under our eyes for a strategy of tension designed to neutralize the functioning of the Central European democracies.
While the Romanian Euro-Globalist elites are fully aware of the unity of this fight and constantly compare the government in Bucharest to what they call the “dictatorships” of the V4, the Romanian sovereignist elites are quite slow in gaining awareness of the community of interest that now objectively ties them to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, with the PiS-ruled Poland, etc.. Convergences, however, could hardly be clearer: from Warsaw to Bucharest and from Prague to Budapest, everywhere, a social elite of metropolitan white collars (in the sense given to the term “metropolitanization” by the French sociologist Christophe Guilluy) is now fully in favor of a Westernized version of Brezhnev’s good old “limited sovereignty” doctrine, considering, for example, that they serve the “interest” of Poland / Romania by submitting Polish / Romanian courts to the dictates of appointed Brussels bureaucrats, rather than allowing them to “fall under the influence” of … the leaders democratically elected by the Polish / Romanian people. Unlike most of their Western counterparts, these Central European supporters of enlightened Euro-despotism no longer hide the reason for such a political choice: their contemptuous and hateful view of their own peoples, in which they are only willing to see a mass of culturally backward rednecks (“racism”, “sexism”, etc.).
In the increasingly religious / sectarian ideology of the Romanian #rezist movement, this idea of a not only extra-democratic but even anti-democratic legitimacy of the “struggle for the rule of law” leads to a justification of political violence whose effects become more and more visible. On November 17, two star activists of the #rezist movement vandalized PSD MP Florin Iordache’s villa; after the adoption of the report on the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM), which gave Romanian public opinion some bad feelings about the EU (since Romanian people finally see this kind of mechanisms as for what they are: instruments of colonial intimidation), Florin Iordache famously showed a pair of middle fingers to the EU, inside the Romanian parliament – admittedly a less-than-elegant gesture, the example of which, however had been given in June 2018 and against this same PSD by MP Cristian Ghinea of the small Europhile USR party (a parliamentary proxy of the #rezist movement, which now demands … sanctions against Iordache). All this, after months of a fierce anti-government press campaign marked by extensive and premeditated abuse of symbols of non-consensual fellatio. This chain of events, which for the moment is characterized by minor material damage, may seem anecdotal, were it not
- the last of a long series of ominous news, testifying to a dangerous radicalization of the #rezist movement, and including both premeditated provocation (e.g. when these same activists publicly rejoice in the death of a Romanian policewoman, mother of a child, who died in a traffic accident), and acts of spontaneous violence, such as the one which was reported on November 11 from Brăila, where a young Romanian man who generally lives in Sweden has driven a stolen car into the crowd of a shopping center, wounding ten people including two children; drunk, the perpetrator of the attack (“on the verge of terrorism” according to local judges) does not seem to belong to any organized network, but his declarations, filmed immediately after the attack while he was being halfway lynched by the crowd, clearly echo the discourse of #rezist extremism; and
- possibly the forerunner of a crescendo of violence which is only beginning, since #rezist has made public his intention to reiterate on December 1st 2018 – a national holiday, the 100th anniversary of the annexation of Transylvania – its demonstration of August 10th; By knowingly violating the political neutrality that should surround this kind of national commemoration, the #rezist camp de facto admits its total disregard for democratic legality, while its parliamentary spokesmen (the small USR party and the still quite abstract MRÎ, in the process of being created around former European Commissioner Dacian Cioloş) are calling for the resignation of the government.
Quite tellingly, Klaus Johannis’s NLP did not join this call, obviously fearing to see his public image associated with that of this coup attempt which does not even bother any more to hide its real nature – on the one hand, because, in the event of failure of said attempt, the verdict of the ballot boxes could considerably weaken it in the 2019 European elections and the Romanian presidential elections which will follow (lacking a real social basis, the USR and the MRÎ do not have such problems); on the other hand, because even if the putsch is successful, the Western “investment” made in support of Dacian Cioloş strongly suggests that Johannis and his men may be losing their international support, and risk end up sharing – ironically – the fate of former president Traian Băsescu four years ago, scapegoated by his former allies to promote the rise of the Johannis team. Finally, from the surroundings of the NLP, a number of smaller public figures (such as academics Adrian Papahagi and Mihai Neamţu) seem to have already said goodbye to NLP and USR, and announce the creation of a “new Christian Right Party” of “Atlanticist” orientation – probably in the hope that such a party would be able to compete with the ruling PSD-ALDE coalition in courting the Trump-Netanyahu axis, but also in an attitude of denial regarding the ongoing Berlin-Washington divorce – which may inspire some skepticism about the chances of success of such a project.
Meanwhile, the same Europhile “civil society” holds protests in Prague and Bratislava, while Hungary and Poland are on the hot seat of “European institutions”.
Faced with this frontal assault on democracy, the “illiberal” ruling classes of the V4 is overwhelmingly in favor of a sovereignist Euro-reformism without breaking the Union – breaking whose supposed economic effects are (rightly or wrongly) seen as frightening to a part of their own constituency. Conscious of the fact that such a strategy will inevitably lead to disaster unless they form a unitary front for the rejection of Western interference, all these countries have, over the past decade, de facto significantly revised their position and discourse on the old interethnic disputes characteristic of the region – a trend whose best current examples are probably the (discrete but) dazzling Hungarian-Slovak and Hungarian-Serbian reconciliations. In addition, by multiplying his declarations of friendship towards the Orthodox world, the very mediatic Viktor Orbán, de facto champion of the illiberal camp, has, in all likelihood, profoundly modified the historical doctrine of his party regarding anticommunism: from their formerly “geostrategic” anticommunism (opposition to the Soviet occupation then still perceived as a “totalitarian” manifestation of “Eastern barbarism”), hardliners within FIDESZ have now gone all the way to a philosophical anticommunism (presently embodied by the refusal of the kind of New World Order the West is trying to impose on them, a project presented – rightly so in my opinion – as a more or less direct inheritance of the Bolshevik utopia).
At the forefront of this unification movement, Viktor Orbán’s FIDESZ has even adopted a proactive policy, particularly with regard to Romania: while in September 2018 the Romanian MEPs of the PSD almost all voted for the Sargentini report, which largely consisted in officializing internationally the lies about Hungary first put into local circulation by the Hungarian press of the Open Society, two months later almost to the day, the FIDESZ MEPs voted against a CVM report intended to humiliate Romania following an almost identical method – and this, while the Romanian MEPs from Klaus Johannis’ NLP (colleagues of said FIDESZ MEPs within the EPP!) voted … against their own country!
And yet, the Bucharest-V4 axis is slow to set up, because of a Romanian cultural inertia whose deep causes I have already commented upon elsewhere. Under the influence of an old tradition of Romanian exceptionalism, the Romanian sovereignty elites (i.e., for the time being: a few prominent intellectuals, a dozen websites and two or three newspapers), while loudly approving the international politics of Hungary and (even more so) Poland, are reluctant to accept the generous Hungarian offer.
This perilous timidity is, on the one hand, the result of unfounded, but sincere, prejudices, as a result of the permeability of the Romanian sovereignist debate to the influence of various chauvinistic publicists who – by conviction or to fulfill a mission – are well versed in keeping up the xenophobic-paranoid folklore that already made all the “charm” of the last (and hardest) period of the Ceaușescu era. The most famous of them, Dan Tănasa, a Romanian living in the Szekler Land (a region with a clear Hungarian-speaking ethnic majority) has made it his main hobby to go through Szekler villages and townlets tearing off the (according to him “unconstitutional”) Szekler flags that cross his path, and devotes the rest of his “working day” to an intense activity of denouncing “Hungarian extremism” (which, let us remember, has not made one Romanian victim for decades, and has not run armed units ever since the end of the Second World War). Given the importance of the investment (in finance and personnel) made by the Romanian Deep State in the “press as a tactical field” (as members of said Deep State have themselves admitted), it is reasonable to ask how many of Dan Tănasa’s “anti-irredentist” colleagues are in fact agents of the Romanian Information Service and other para-police structures, whose Euro-Globalist patrons now have an obvious interest in maintaining said ethnic paranoia.
On the other hand, the “war against irredentism” is one of the areas in which the Romanian Deep State, in its repressive actions, makes the most blatant mockery of the rules of law – as my own arbitrary expulsion has recently shown; we can therefore also assume that intimidation works, so that the Romanian sovereignist milieu, even if it begins to doubt the validity of the “anti-irredentist” narrative, might be understandably reluctant to make its doubts public.
The trouble is that, despite the extreme patience and strategic intelligence shown by Budapest in this case, on December 1, 2018, history is likely to draw fees on that overdue claim which is the constantly procrastinated aggiornamento of the founding narrative of Romanian nationalism, still blocked in the version produced, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by several generations of Romanian patriots specially trained to make Romania a back ally of the German world against Hungary. In the Szekler Land, a mobilization – quite untimely, it must be said, from the point of view of the Romanian political agenda – is under way in favor of regional autonomy. Adding to possible casualties which the #rezist camp is now openly seeking to provoke in Bucharest, there is, thus, an increased risk of interethnic incidents in Transylvania – a risk all the higher as the Romanian Deep State, at the head of the largest and best financed staff of all the national “intelligence communities” in Europe, seems to have a vested interest in letting the situation degenerate. This December 1st, 2018 which, if well managed, could have provided the opportunity for a great national and regional reconciliation, might thus, on the contrary, become, not only for the government coalition led by Liviu Dragnea, but also for Romania as a whole, the day of all dangers.
